Ain’t That America? – Page 5

The Birth of Educational Wokeism – A Personal Story

19. April 2022 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, General Nonsense, Literary Good Stuff

I’m almost certain that I witnessed the seeds of teacher-training wokism yea these four decades ago when I was wrapping up the class hours necessary for a degree in English, an age before it became screamingly obvious that a BA in English didn’t guarantee that the recipient of it was conversant with proper grammar, spelling, the literary output of the greats from Chaucer to Wilde, or blessed with the ability (even if only acquired through imitation) to write in a clear and pleasing style.
With my usual efficiency and persistence, I had managed to complete every single required class for that golden degree by three and a half years into the enterprise, leaving me with just a requirement for so many class credits subject unspecified for my final semester toiling in the groves of academy as they presented at Cal State University Northridge. (A state uni with practically no notable characteristics or reputation then, or now. It was your standard state university, providing in a workmanlike fashion, higher education to a mixed bag of students – freshly minted high-school alums, foreign students, working adults and returning senior citizens.)

So, I looked at the catalog offerings for the spring of 1976 and decided that I would indulge myself intellectually and just sign up for any elective that looked interesting in the catalog. This put me in a class in Roman Art & Architecture, and another in Japanese Art &Architecture, both of which proved to be totally fascinating, challenging, and eventually useful – the Japanese one, especially, as it turned out to be a graduate-level one aimed at art majors, and did I have to seriously hit the books in order to pass! The Roman A&A final included a final exam involving drawing an accurate map of classical Rome from memory, naming the seven hills, including the lines of major avenues and aqueducts, and marking the location of about twenty major landmarks. This turned out to be useful when I passed through Rome as a tourist in 1985 …

It was the third ‘what the heck that sounds interesting’ elective which was the class that I found memorable and for not a good reason. I began to hate it, root and branch, topic and professor … a smug and smarmy male who reminds me in memory of the irritating Arnold Rimmer from Red Dwarf. The subject of the class was “Children’s Literature” and upon reading it in the catalog, I thought – hey, interesting subject, a study of classic kid-lit from the early days, a survey of the bigs in kid-lit; a little Frances Hodgson Burnett, some of this and that … what made writing and reading for the underage set appealing over the decades …
I had been raised on classic kid-lit. Mom was rigorous in that respect. I had all of them, either read to us, or on the shelves to read for ourselves. Everything: Child’s Garden of Verses, Little House on the Prairie and all in the series, Little Women and the sequels, Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, the Secret Garden, Little Lord Fauntleroy, the Jungle Books, Winnie the Pooh and dozens more. I thought I would be in a class exploring what made those books and others such enchanting and enduring reads. What made them so special that they were still being read by and to children for decades or even centuries after having been written … and in that I was crushingly disappointed. More than that – outraged, although never sufficiently to rend the lector from limb to limb and encourage my fellow students to piss on the bloody remains. I did want that BA degree, you see. I already had plans, post-graduation.

As it turned out and which I should have noted before enrolling in it, the class was one of those required/elective for those aiming for a teaching credential in the state of California. And it was dire … I figured that out within the first couple of lectures. First, when the lector/professor figuratively urinated all over Child’s Garden of Verses, condemning it for being stupid bad poetry with an ump-de-ump rhyme. Yes, the poetry in Garden is fairly simple – Shakespearean sonnets it isn’t – and yet I (and others) can still recite verse after verse from memory. Then when the lecturer took a number-two dump on Wind in the Willows, picking out one chapter – The Piper At the Gates of Dawn – for an extra specially contemptuous sneering as saccharine, sentimental and trite. For myself, I had always loved Wind in the Willows, and believed that chapter to be charming, lyrical, and beautifully descriptive.

So, the lector/professor was an obnoxious philistine; I am certain there were skid-row bums and burned-out hippies with better literary judgement. Just to put the rancid frosting on this rancid cake of a course, he … umm … exposed the class to a bit of kid-lit that he thought was just the thing for your average middle-school reader. I have mercifully forgotten the title and author, although at this date I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a book that he had written. The hero and narrator was a teen boy whose family went from Nantucket Island in time for the 1893 Oklahoma land rush, set up a homestead there, and then by some misfortune that I don’t recall, the father died, they flaked out of the homestead claim, and the boy and his mother went all the way back to Nantucket – sadder and wiser, or so the narrative had it. A highlight of the book was the boy acquiring a girlfriend who had been a captive of the Indians (tribe unspecified, or at any rate, I don’t remember) and it was implied had been sexually initiated by the experience. She gave him a hand-job, described in a conversation between the two of them. Ugh.

That was the point when I decided that it was a darned good thing that I didn’t want to be a grade schoolteacher, if this kind of materiel was what one had make a show of lauding, while spurning the great body of enduring stories and poetry. I wonder how many other rational people made the same decision – and that’s why our schools are deeply mired in predatory wokeism. Comment as you wish. And no, I never wanted to teach school anyway, but if I had, I am certain this one class would have kicked any such desire out of me. I’ll just write good stories for kids, and read the good stuff to Wee Jamie.

Our Culture, What There Is of It

13. April 2022 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Old West, Texas

This last weekend, I actually went out of my house/neighborhood and did something different. Something interesting and out in the real world, or something that resembled the real world, out there, beyond the keyboard and computer screen. I had a table for my books at a cultural event, the Folkfest in New Braunfels. Historically, New Braunfels was one of the German Verein-founded towns in the Texas Hill Country, one of those that I have written about in my historical series; the main reason that I was invited to the bash under the oak trees at the Heritage Society’s campus on the northern edge of town. The Adelsverein Trilogy touches on the circumstances and reason why more than eight thousand German immigrants ended up on the wild and unsettled Texas frontier in the 1840s. A consortium of German noblemen and princes hoped to make a tidy profit – and to do a good deed for their struggling countrymen – by taking up an entrepreneur grant in the independent Republic of Texas. They were honest in their hope to make the venture advantageous economically for them, which distinguishes them from many other ostensibly charitable enterprises of late. That the Adelsverein went broke within two years had more to do with the princely gentlemen overselling their program to eager potential immigrants and badly underestimating the costs in transporting them to Texas. That it resulted in a godly number of able, educated, independent-minded and patriotic new citizens turned out to be a bonus. It also resulted in Kendal, Gillespie and Comal counties being almost completely German-speaking for better than a hundred years, which explained the prevalence of dirndls and lederhosen worn with cowboy boots at the Folkfest.

The Heritage Society has moved a number of buildings of historical note onto the property; a dog-trot cabin, carpenter’s shop, a windmill, one-room schoolhouse. blacksmith shop and others. For the Folkfest, these buildings are inhabited by docents and volunteers, augmented by historical reenactors in tents and pavilions, eager to exhibit their skills and gear. The flintlock and black powder shooters shot their long rifles regularly during the two days, as did the cannon crew with their antique artillery piece. There was live music under the trees – a Celtic band, a children’s choir singing German folksongs, a clogging dance troupe, an array of country-western singers – and a children’s costume parade on Saturday, carrying on the tradition of a May Day parade established by the teacher of the first school in New Braunfels in the 1850s. A pair of charro performers demonstrated rope tricks and fancy riding skills in a temporary rink, the owner of a genuine 1913 Ford Model-T gave rides around the circuit of the grounds, and the owners of an authentic cowboy chuckwagon demonstrated making biscuits and cooking over a fire with iron Dutch ovens. In other years at Folkfest I have seen lace-makers showing off their skills, and carpenters demonstrating how to use templates and hand-tools to shape chair spindles and legs. Last year, the hayride was in a wagon pulled by a pair of horses, this year merely a trailer lined with hay-bales pulled by a tractor. But there was a good crowd, over this last weekend; families and couples having fun, listening to the music while sitting at the tables by the beer garden, under the great oak tree in the center of the grounds by the beer garden. There wasn’t a single mask in sight, and no social distancing that I could see. It all reminded me that not everything is awful and catastrophic – and that many of us are holding on tight to our history and our traditions.

: Weapons Array – the large revolver at upper left is a Walker Colt, which weighs nearly five pounds

: More weapons and gear

: Chilling by the Tent, 19th century style

: Your Author, with 1913 Ford

: Having a blast with antique artillery.

: Wee Jamie, the Revolutionary Baby

Done With Disney

31. March 2022 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Media Matters Not, That's Entertainment!

I posted a couple of weeks ago on this blog how distressed I was at the turn that the management of Disney’s corporation had gone of late and having made a personal decision to delete Disney from my range of entertainment interests. Now it seems that Disney management is going full woke and full steam ahead … which, OK, is the choice of corporations to make in their sphere. If management of Disney wants to go all-gay all the time, in catering to a bare 2-3% of the public, it’s their company, their choice. Maybe not a good one, but theirs to make.
Now, what isn’t OK is for a corporation to come out full-throated political in the case of Florida’s law limiting what can be construed as sex ed to the elementary school set; this aimed at kids barely aware that there are differences between boys and girls. Believe me, parents and grandparents feel very strongly that such lessons are wildly inappropriate – to the point of being construed as sexual grooming. Normal parents (and grandparents) will not put up with lesson materiel which is almost guaranteed to damage children, especially as a fair number of elementary school teachers seem prone to overshare regarding their own sexual conduct.

Families and kids were formerly the Disney audience and favored consumers. For decades, the entertainment parks, the movies, the whole ball-o-wax that is the Disney brand was scrupulously wholesome, family-oriented, a version of a small-town American main street all sanitized to a fair-the-well, safe, clean, and G-rated. The parks were supposed to be fun, magical places, safe places; maybe expensive, but worth it for the fun of seeing your kid talk to Chip the chipmunk, or Princess Aurora, have a blast riding through Mr. Toad’s wild ride, or watching an almost-full-scale paddle wheel steamboat circulate through the lagoon. As I had posted before, I grew up, visiting Disneyland in Anaheim, California – as a very great occasional treat, through school, Scouts or with the grandparents. I took my daughter there, when she was a toddler, and she in turn had – I emphasize the past tense here – expressed an ambition to take Wee Jamie to Disneyworld when he was a little older and she had made enough of a bundle in real estate to afford a week or so.

At this point, this week – I’m done with Disney. Completely. Regretfully, but there it is. No more Disney-themed merchandise (not that we ever bought much to start with) or going to see, stream or buy DVDs of Disney movies. No visits to D-Land, or D-World. Just done with them. They certainly won’t miss me, I suspect, and they might be able to carry on, depending on what they have banked, and the patronage of people who don’t really care that the Disney corporate leadership are in favor of grooming prepubescent children sexually. There may be a lot of other parents and grandparents like me out there – and perhaps a boycott might have an adverse effect on Disney. I’m sorry for those conservatives who work there. But the Disney organization today is not what it once was, when Walt Disney was the man in charge. It is now something malign, harmful, even – look at the train-wreck lives of the most recent Disney juvenile actresses and actors. There is something nasty in their woodshed, and I want no part of it for my grandson or any other children that I care about. Discuss as you wish.

Bearing False Witness

24. March 2022 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?

Depending on the version of the Ten Commandments, the eighth or ninth is “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” – in simpler terms, you shouldn’t tell lies, especially a lie intended to falsely accuse another person. I was reminded again, of the damage done by malicious accusations, upon reading this horrifying story, linked through Insty – because there was such a malicious person in the neighborhood where my family lived for more than a decade – a person given to making random and spurious accusations about his neighbors. When I wrote about my family, I called this residence Hilltop House – a post-war bungalow perched on the knee of a range of hills, surrounded by similar and rather modest houses on half-acre or quarter-acre lots, spread out along a rambling tangle of narrow roads above Sunland-Tujunga. A good block away from Hilltop house was a cul d sac of about half a dozen houses; one of the residents in the cul d sac was an older couple … and the man, who I will call Felix S. began to go nuts. Like bankruptcy, it happened slowly and then all at once. He became convinced that his neighbors were all part of a vast conspiracy to manufacture drugs and that there were tunnels and pipelines running the drugs between all the houses around him, and that odors from the drug manufacturing were poisoning the air around his house. Eventually, he put up all kinds of industrial fans around his yard, intended to blow the fumes away, and became notorious as the “Fan Man.” But that came later.

He spied on neighbors, haunted the roads outside their houses, lurked in the hedges, taking down license plate numbers, walked around with a box in his hands which he insisted was detecting the drug fumes … and called the police incessantly, sharing his delusions with them. Of course, the LAPD pretty soon realized that Mr. S. was a total nutcase. When Mr. S. realized that they were blowing him off, he escalated to calling other law enforcement bodies – the county sheriff’s office, other municipal, state, and possibly even national law enforcement; for all I know, everyone short of the Secret Service. At one point, he began insisting that his next-door neighbor, an elderly woman who was dying of MS – was a serious drug abuser and that was what was killing her. I know there was at least one unsuccessful court case for unrelenting harassment brought against him by the nearest neighbors, but nothing legal could be done at first, as Mr. S. kept the derangement on the down-low in the courtroom, and came off as a respectable, reasonable citizen. My mother was convinced that Mr. S. had an undiagnosed brain tumor, which would account for the delusions of strange odors. In any case, when my sister Pip was married, we had the reception afterwards at Hilltop House … and there was Mr. S. lurking in the oleander shrubs outside the gate, writing down the license-plate numbers of our guests’ cars! Otherwise, we were spared the worst of Mr. S., although because of a house full of teenagers and a yard full of vintage cars, he apparently assumed that we were in the distribution end of the business and not the manufacture. Eventually, the ongoing annoying presence of Mr. S. in the neighborhood had to be included in the listing of any house for sale in the neighborhood within a certain distance, as if he were a kind of human toxic waste dump.

But that was not the worst, which is what Mom told me about, on what may have been the last time that I was on home leave when they were still living at Hilltop House. It seemed that a young couple with two small children bought a house nearby Mr. S.’s house, a distance by road and address, but on the hill below, and he could see into their back yard. You guessed it – he called the child protection agency and reported that they were abusing their children. This was a new agency, relative to Mr. S.’s mania – and they took his accusation seriously. It took the young couple six months to get their children returned to their custody, or so Mom said.
I was honestly glad when Mom and Dad moved away after Dad retired – Mr. S.’s malicious mania was verging on the dangerous. A good few years ago, I did find a local news story about neighbors bringing successful lawsuits against him, but nothing on him turns up now – I suppose his malicious antics in the old neighborhood are a matter of ancient history at this point. It’s been at least three decades, and there must have been a lot of turnover among residents, what with the real estate market in the outer LA suburbs being what it is. But I was reminded of how damaging bearing false witness can be – right up there with murder, adultery, covetousness and worshipping false gods.
Bearing false witness is like faking a hate crime, or accusing people of various ‘isms, creating a fake dossier/ fake documents for the purposes of smearing a political opponent, ‘swatting’ a person with a fake call to the police, or an anonymous accusation to Child Protective Services. In a more perfect world than this, bearing false witness out to be penalized with the punishment administered to the victim, if the accusation had been true. Discuss as you wish.

Aristos a la Lanterne!

17. March 2022 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, History, Media Matters Not, Politics, Working In A Salt Mine...

When the rage of downtrodden French peasants, living-on-the-edge city dwellers and frustrated bourgeoise towards the ruling nobles and royalty final exploded into a kind of civic wildfire, there was no appeasing their collective anger. A handful of wary and fleet-footed aristocrats, or those who had made a good living out of serving the royals and the nobility fled from France in all directions. The slow and unwary made a humiliating appointment with Madame Guillotine before a contemptuous and jeering crowd, if they had not already run afoul of a mob with pikes and knives, and ropes at the foot of civic lampposts. (The fury of the French Revolution flamed so furiously that it that eventually it burned a good few leading revolutionaries themselves. As the Royalist pamphleteer Jacques Mallet Du Pan remarked pithily, “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.) For a long time, my sympathies as regards parties in the French Revolution tended to be with those who fell out with it, sympathies formed by popular literature and music: The Scarlett Pimpernel, A Tale of Two Cities, Dialogues of the Carmelites, and other tales which basically tut-tutted the madness which overcame all reason and discretion, and championed those who had the brunt of it fall on them, either justly or not. How fortunate that our own very dear revolution had been able to escape such conflagrations: Loyalists in the colonies might have suffered being tarred and feathered and ridden out of town or having to leave in an undignified rush when Yankee Doodle went to town and made their independence stick. But the jailhouse regrets of those who called up and inflamed that conflagration, even inadvertently is not my concern here.

It is, rather, the arrogant, condescending incompetence, and corruption of our current ruling class, and the hardships they have and continue to blithely inflict on us all – Covid, inflation, civic disorder, energy shortages, unequal application of law when it comes to public protests, the ruination of our domestic industries, our currency, and a possible war. Our political ruling class and their allies in mass media and academia have all played a part in bringing about all these disasters, while blandly denying blame and responsibility. Clueless arrogance is mingled with single-minded conviction of their own competence and absolute determination to double down on failure, failures which have already ruined lives, businesses, and industries alike, and promise to ruin more. These ruinations have left the ruling class serenely unaffected, and even wealthier than ever, and prone to issuing condescending suggestions to us all that if we can’t afford gas, maybe we ought to buy an electric car. It’s infuriating; but to this point, we feel only a cold, sullen fury. To carry on with the wildfire simile – it’s as if the wood is not only dry, but soaked with gasoline, and these fools are only lacking the book of lighted matches. What will that metaphorical lighted match be, that sends ordinary citizens howling ‘Aristos a la Lanterne!’? Most likely something that affects our children; the insistence of schools in pushing CRT brainwashing and inappropriate sex education to children who are barely aware of sex as it has already has parents lighting up local school boards and teacher’s unions. Discuss as you wish, and have insight into what will send us into the streets singing Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira, or quietly sabotaging the ruling class.

Visions of A Time and Place on the Big and Small Screens

07. February 2022 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Local, Media Matters Not

I am tempted to start watching the series 1883 – and likely will, as soon as it appears in one of our regular streaming services, but I am wondering, just reading about it – how far into the episodes I can get before walking away.

I mean, we barely lasted one episode into Texas Rising; a hideous and heartbreaking waste of time and video, being shot mostly in the wild mountains of Durango, Mexico, which bore no resemblance at all to the topography of Texas.* And no, the chapel of the Alamo does not have a crypt. They did get two things right, although the rest of the series was a cringe-fest, according to viewers who had stomachs stronger than mine. Texas did fight a war for independence from the Centralist dictatorship of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, and there was a battle at the Alamo in San Antonio, and another at San Jacinto, barely six months later. Otherwise, Texas Rising was heartbreaking for Texas history fans, because it could have been a totally enthralling account of the war for independence and the fight for independent statehood – elements and incidents which were so dramatic and improbable that hardly anything needed to be made up out of whole cloth.

That series and countless others fell into a common fault of movies and television series when ‘doing’ a Western – that is, a story set on the American frontier in the 19^th century – wherever that frontier happened to be in any given decade from the 1820s on to the end of that century. The common failing is to run it all together in one murky blur, as if technologies large and small remained constant, as did fashions, the political and geographical landscape, relations with various Indian tribes. As I wrote in this essay, several years ago, “there were very specific and distinct places, as different as they could be and still be on the same continent. 1880’s Tombstone is as different from Gold Rush-era Sacramento, which is different again from Abilene in the cattle-boom years, nothing like Salt Lake City when the Mormons first settled there – and which is different again from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s small-town De Smet in the Dakota Territory – or any other place that I could name, between the Pacific Ocean and the Mississippi-Missouri.”

Setting the series to start in 1883 is curious enough – it’s just rather late in the history of the frontier to generate a long-trail wagon-train journey, and from Texas to Montana, too. The western market in beef cattle was about to go bust by the middle of that decade, and the northern ranges ravaged by two especially harsh winters in a row. The various Indian wars along the frontier were done and dusted, all but the last uprising of the Lakota Sioux, inspired by the Ghost Dance movement. The transcontinental railroad had been completed long since. By the mid-1880s just about every major city in the United States and Canada was connected by a network of shining steel rails, obliviating the necessity of a long and dangerous journey by wagon-train across all-but-empty lands in most of the trans-Mississippi west. A cast interview that I did read mentioned that the producers and directors were going all out for authenticity. Well, we’ll see, eventually. I recollect reading an article in Smithsonian, of all places – which lauded all the ways in which the producers of The Patriot were going all out in historical fidelity, but once I watched that movie, I realized that the authenticity was all in small details, such as props, costumes and weaponry … just not the whopping big plot elements, personalities and key incidents. I’m afraid that I will find the series 1888 to be another helping of the same old stuff.

*Wierdly enough – the movie The Highwaymen got the topography exactly right. Yes – the wide lonely vistas, the two-lane paved roads with the line of spindly power poles along-side and the bare fields of new corn or cotton, or whatever spreading out on either side, the tiny roadside gas stations … were exactly right. The small towns, and transient camps, the little tourist cabin enclaves … also exactly right, as to time and place. I have pictures of my own, taken on various road trips which can affirm this. I don’t know how much that the production company for The Highwaymen spent to do location shooting – can’t have been more than Texas Rising – but one big production got it right, and the other fell spectacularly flat when it came to the ‘look’ of places.

Wagging the Dog

03. February 2022 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Media Matters Not

I actually do recollect seeing the movie of that name and a mildly amusing venture it was, into speculative political fiction; a whole war generated out of thin air by an unholy cabal of scheming bureaucrats, a conniving segment of the entertainment industry and a tame media, eager to be spoon-fed an appealing story if it would goose ratings by a point or so … and all in the cause of burying a political scandal involving a US president by setting up a war, with a hero and a theme song and cheering crowds and all. The movie was based on a book by Larry Beinart – weirdly enough, I also have a copy of it on my shelves. The book is much, much darker than the movie, but the premise is just as improbable; the national news media and the Industrial Entertainment complex going all in to generate and publicize a war with the aim of re-electing a Republican president at the bidding of and through dark money provided by a Republican eminence grise? Talk about the suspension of belief necessary to find that concept credible; not even with a bucket truck and one of those enormous construction cranes used for high-rise projects …<!–more–>

I thought at the time that both novel and movie were a diverting trifle, but really – was the national news media really that transparently credulous? I was an innocent in those days. Not so much the innocent after seeing the Tea Party protests and rallies being viciously calumniated solo and chorus by the entertainment and mainstream media. My cynicism dial was turned up to eleven, following that experience. Yes, they are that transparently credulous and incurious regarding any apparent contradictions between what they are spoon-feed and what is going on before the lying eyes of the rest of us. Now they are doing the same kind of group character assassination on those who refused to get a vaccination or a booster vaccination for the Chinese Commie Crud, or who object to anti-white racism taught to our children in the public schools, or who do rather like earning a living at a small business without being looted and burned into bankruptcy.

Now in this lamentable century, where anything goes in the established media, even if it seems ludicrous at first or second glance in comparison to reality. We are seeing a concerted effort on the part of our national establishment media to vanish the rising cost of practically everything at the grocery store; who are we supposed to believe, the establishment news media and the Brandon administration or the evidence of our lying eyes? We’ve had two years of the Chinese Commie Crud, with masks, lockdowns, mandatory vaccinations, and requirements for vaxx passports – so what if the dreaded Covid plague didn’t quite become the 1918 Influenza epidemic, or the medieval Black Death, either. It still provided an opportunity for bureaucrats and elected officials of an authoritarian bent to let their inner dictator out for a romp, and for the establishment media to do their best to scare the snot out of everyone. It’s becoming plain that the Commie Crud wasn’t a tenth as deadly as it was all made out to be, early on. A lot of us besides Canadian long-haul truck drivers are as tired of it as we can be, and likewise tired of being called racists and fascists for saying so. Can the news media go on wagging the Commie Crud or the inflationary dog for much longer? What other media tails are trying to wag the reality dog? Discuss as you wish.

People Farming

27. January 2022 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, My Head Hurts, Politics, Rant, sarcasm

It was a comment on this blog which struck me immediately upon reading it. The subsequent discussion in the comment thread was how antisocial behavior on the part of massive numbers of homeless people setting up massive, festering camps in the downtown areas of certain cities was making those cities less and less inviting for ordinary people. In the final analysis, no one really wants to come to work in a place where they have to step around feces on the sidewalk, dodge the aggressive panhandler outside a downtown restaurant, or run from the homicidal crazy looking to shove someone off the subway platform in front of an oncoming train. Downtown retailers can’t keep on in business long when the merchandise walks out the door, assisted by undocumented shoppers; so, eventually the normals – that is, those of us with jobs, property, and a liking for clean, non-threatening surroundings – decamp the urban jungle for something a little less edgy, usually taking our dollars, investments, responsible civic behavior, and tax base with us.
Why on earth do certain cities – San Francisco and Los Angeles being the two which spring to mind almost at once – allow this to continue? What benefit does it give to see gracious, scenic, and culturally-attractive cities descend into a condition which repels longtime residents and new visitors alike? What’s in it for the civic managers of such urban centers … and as it was pointed out, there’s money in it.<!–more–>

There’s money in it, administering programs which succor the homeless … which, if the homeless were ever successfully homed … would mean an end to that mission and money stream. So the civic powers that be have a vested interest in keeping those programs going, and even expanding them to minister to ever-increasing numbers of homeless. Which makes the powers-that-be feel all noble, responsive, responsible and unselfish-like … but which one commenter on the linked thread pointed out … for all intents and purposes they are <em>farming people for a money crop</em>.

And that was where I had that blinding flash of the obvious insight … yes, indeed; they are farming people for the money crop. Civic powers in certain locations are tending a segment of their population most assiduously, for the money crop to be harvested from them. Once possessed of this frame, I began to wonder what other collection of bodies are being farmed for the profitable money crop to be harvested by the controlling powers. Public schools came to my mind almost at once: students in a public school setting are the crop, and oh, they must be a profitable crop indeed for the teacher union farmers who make a gesture of teaching, but which are essentially farming students. What are the various impulses towards a national and universal health-care scheme, but another people-farming project on the part of various powers that be? Discuss as you wish.

Priviliges

20. January 2022 · 1 comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Devil Dogs, Fun and Games, Media Matters Not, Military

Well, I see from the linked story, that the educational geniuses in Fairfax County have trodden heavily on their essential nether parts, yet again, in their demented crusade to shove critical race theory, or whatever it is called this week to disguise the whole rotten concept, down the throats of hapless students of all colors on the Pantone scale. This time around, they tried to foist off the concept of military dependents being somehow uniquely privileged. More »

The Way We Watch Now

13. January 2022 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Media Matters Not

The Hollywood-based entertainment industry appears to have written off most of America in Flyoverlandia (according to this post) as hopelessly unwoke, racist and dumber than dirt, in their untiring efforts to embody the soul of Woke in their various offerings. Apparently, they believe in an audience just waiting uncritically out here; An audience intellectually gape-mouthed like baby birds just waiting to swallow uncritically whatever gets dropped into them. In pursuit of that goal, according to the same article, they have made their own professional hellscape, what with the growing fear that one wrong word, tweet or visual will make them the unemployable target of their peers, in the grand scramble for achieving ultimate wokery by scapegoating each other. Couldn’t happen to a nicer lot of vicious, vacuous, jerks, hypocrites, and pedophiles … even as the audience for movies released in theaters drops through the floor, and the most-watched continuing streaming video drama is one which has done so practically unnoticed by the mainstream news and entertainment media. More »

Apparently, We Have Been Naughty

21. December 2021 · 2 comments · Categories: Ain't That America?, Cry Wolf, General Nonsense

We have all been naughty, disobedient, ungrateful serfs – or so say the self-nominated Covidiocy experts, especially including those of nationwide media fame and of a political stripe known for their fanatical allegiance to the current ruling class. We’re supposed to get another tongue-lashing from the White House tonight, which has already promised a winter of severe illnesses and death for those holding out against getting vaccinated against the latest Covid variant. Are they going to cancel Christmas for those who won’t cooperate? Are we now all enrolled in the variant-of-the-month club, and expected to maintain a constant intravenous drip of boosters for the endless variants? More »

On the Edge

15. December 2021 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Eat, Drink and be Merry, Home Front, Local

My daughter and I have just finished making the various kinds of fudge that we distribute to neighbors, friends, and various workers and employees of places that we do business with. We hit upon this seasonal gift a good few years ago, after a visit to a very nice shop in Fredericksburg in the Hill Country, which featured infinite varieties of fudge. Those that we tasted were excellent, and my daughter was inspired to replicate the variety. We had previously done cookies and other home-made treats, but when it came around the next year and neighbors began asking us, with wistful hope, “Are you going to make fudge again, this year? We really liked it …” we realized that we were onto a winning strategy for holiday gifting.

The assortment – packaged in little tins from the Dollar Tree

Alternative Structure

08. December 2021 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Geekery, Politics

I did note this story on Axios, which was discussed scathingly and at length on Ace of Spades; that the Lefty Progs have belatedly realized that, yes indeedy, us social and political conservatives are building our alternate establishments, in media, money-management, retail, and everywhere else. Welcome to the party, pal… It goes without saying that the Lefty Progs disapprove, most indignantly. I noted the split a little more than a year ago, in this post.

We’re already at the split. We read different books, watch different movies and television shows – those of us who still watch movies and television – follow different celebrities, earn a living in different ways, educate our children differently. We honor different things, different heroes and heroines, have wildly different aspirations and hopes for the future. We are already split. More »

Sorting Out the Pantry – Getting Ready for Thanksgiving

23. November 2021 · 1 comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Home Front, Local

After our adventures a couple of weeks ago in sorting out the garage deep freezer, my daughter and I decided that we ought to tackle the pantry – which we had done a year or so ago and disposed of most of the badly out-of-date food and condiment items at that time. We did so again today, but fortunately this time the oldest item found was some ranch dressing mix from 2013. The few other items disposed of were of a much more recent vintage. There were two reasons for this project; the first being that we simply had to find the little jar of turkey brine mix that we bought last year after Thanksgiving. We had bought a jar of the same brand after Thanksgiving, 2019, and used it for the turkey breast last year, and it was absolutely splendid! Yes, we shop the marked-down shelves, after the holidays. Got a problem with that? (The way prices are going up on various items, this is something that all of us had better get accustomed to doing.) And, no, I don’t believe the quality degrades after sitting a year – it’s mostly salt, sugar, and an interesting blend of spices and dried fruit.

The other reason was that I had two lots of new air-tight pantry containers – various sizes, all to store the various flours, pastas, rice, grains, and beans in. The pantry was crammed to overflowing, with much of the contents in round glass jars in various sizes, which didn’t make economical use of space, and square containers with the contents marked, which would possibly make better use of the telephone-booth-sized pantry … (‘Mom? What IS this?’ ‘Either bulger wheat or wheat berries…’) (‘Why do we have three different bags or jars of jasmine rice/bean thread noodles/cornmeal?’ ‘Because we couldn’t find them the last time we were looking and just bought more…’) I understand that this happens with ill-organized garages. Can’t find the hammer – go and buy another, which is how people finish up with half a dozen hammers, or adjustable wrenches…

It turns out that we have a ton more of dried and canned beans, canned tomatoes, and various oriental noodle items than we thought we did. Our resolve to carefully store and label the darned things is renewed. And putting all the various dried staples into square containers and labeling them as to the contents turns out to have saved considerable space in the pantry, as well as making certain items much more visible, even if this project took up most of the day. Which should save time in searching for them, the next time we need a can of coconut milk, a bit of tomato paste …

We’re brining a turkey breast we bought some weeks ago, and putting together a nice small family Thanksgiving feast, turkey, mashed potatoes, roasted brussels sprouts, wheat bread and sausage stuffing, gravy and the usual pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce – all carefully calculated so that we don’t have too much in the way of leftovers … when I was growing up, we’d be eating turkey leftovers in various guises for most of the three weeks after Thanksgiving … and just when we polished off the last of it … there came the Christmas turkey and another month of leftovers.

For Christmas dinner, we’re planning on doing Boeuf en Croûte. The beef roast is in the freezer – we bought it a few weeks ago. May as well, while we can still afford it …

Christmas Hamper Past

20. November 2021 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Eat, Drink and be Merry, Memoir

I was reminded of one of my personal great moments in customer service when I ran across this article in the Daily Mail. Honestly, I think that the provision of expensive gift hampers for the holidays is one of those in which British merchants have it all over American, but then they had a long, long, long head start on us. More »

Around the Next Corner

10. November 2021 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Politics, Working In A Salt Mine...

What lurks in hiding for us there? Nothing good, and that is the general feeling one gets from the ripples and small currents in the wide ocean of the blogosphere. I’ve been paddling in that ocean since … 2002, when I gave up on Slate as an original aggregator news site shortly after 9-11, because the communities which gathered in the various comments sections just got too angry and irrational for words. Something let me to Instapundit, and through his links to the original incarnation of Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief. I became a contributor when the original Stryker appealed for other contributors and have been paddling away at the margins of the digital information ocean ever since. Back in the pre-internet day, I had subscriptions to all kinds of magazines. As a military public relations professional, I reasoned that I should know when and from which direction the next political- military-social sh*t-storm would arrive. Tracking blogs and digital media serves the same purpose for me that print media once did. More »

Jiggery Pokery, Whackadoodle Wokery

01. November 2021 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Politics

My daughter and I have a local writer friend who teaches at the elementary school level – a local quasi-magnet type school which advertises itself as offering a challenging college prep curriculum, and she is discouraged beyond words over how difficult it is to interest the pupils, especially the boys in her class in reading. Of course, given the run of books generated of late by mainstream establishment publishing, aimed at the YA and young readers and then approved by schoolteachers and librarians … most of them seem to be a grim wallow in social or familial dysfunction, misery, gloom, and despair … plus of late, lashings of sexual confusion as well – of the latter, it seems the more explicit, the better. More »

Civility

27. October 2021 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Media Matters Not, sarcasm

In the aftermath of large crowds chanting “Lets Go, Brandon” or the ruder, cruder variant, certain prog media figures are reacting by ostentatiously clutching their pearls and demanding civility. In response to such demands, many of us who have paid attention over the years are pointing out that the civility ship has long sailed … in fact, circumnavigated the world, crashed into the homeport dock, burned to the waterline, and sank in a gusher of steam. More »

04. October 2021 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, My Head Hurts, Politics

It’s one of those things which I was always mildly aware of for decades, mostly through the medium of novels with an English setting … but now it has become painfully and bitterly obvious that there is an American class system, it’s malignant. Here, we had always prided ourselves on being relatively class/caste fluid, a place where one might go from rags to riches through striking it rich, developing a better mousetrap, investing cannily, and still be on the same social level as ‘old money’. This new divide is bitter, hostile, and possibly lethal. It’s the social and political authoritarians, who crave power over the rest of us, pitted against the working and middle classes – those who have a degree of control over our own lives, enough income to be at least tenuously comfortable, the leisure and energy to take part in public matters, even if only in a small way. The middle class have the effrontery to believe that yes, we ought to be able to control our own lives, rather than have every aspect controlled by the authoritarians.

The Twilight Zone

05. January 2021 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam, History, Iran, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant

Well, it appears that the mullahcracy in Iran is still steamed over the death of their military mastermind Quassam Soleimani, the chief of so-called Quds Force â€“ sort of the Iranian SS, I have always thought. On the one-year anniversary of that momentous drone-zap (a consummation quite overdue in my opinion) the president of Iran directly threatened the life of President Trump. Talk is cheap, and Iranian threats of dire revenge are the equivalent of those teeny and nearly worthless Spanish 1-peseta coins, which were struck from aluminum in the early 1990s, about the size of a childâ€™s fingernail and looked like nothing so much as doll money. But still â€¦ the militant Muslims of Iran are certainly dedicated and determined sufficiently to have racked up any number of lesser-known and less-protected hits, so I wouldnâ€™t be surprised at all if this was something more than just tough talk for the benefit of their domestic audience and fans of Islamic mayhem in other countries.

In Accordance With the Prophecies…

24. November 2020 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Politics

â€¦the Schlichter prophecies, I mean, wherein the good Colonel Kurt S. postulated a political/geographic split of the United States along red-blue lines. In his bleak and blackly humorous vision, (carried out over a five-volume series) the middle portion of the States carried on with fidelity to the Constitution, free-range capitalism, and universal military service as an obligation for full citizenship. Meanwhile the east and west coasts as a so-called â€œPeopleâ€™s Republicâ€ carried on under an increasingly deranged and erratic progressive principles, turning into a dysfunctional combination of Portlandâ€™s CHAZ/CHOP, any PC-addled university you could name, Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe and Venezuela at this very moment. The series is meant to be grimly entertaining, but Iâ€™m beginning to believe that the split has already happened â€“ not in the neat geographic manner (with some violent hiccups) outlined â€“ but in a slower and murkier manner.

And Now For Something Entirely Different…

18. November 2020 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General Nonsense, Home Front, Military, Stupidity, Veteran's Affairs

Another horrific gaffe in retail marketing – one which falls into the category of â€œgrotesquely bad retail marketing decisions which will become a cautionary lesson in future marketing textbooks.â€ This spectacular gaffe involves a retailer of fashion-trendy and very colorful womenâ€™s athletic clothing, Fabletics â€“ a company which started online in 2013 offering a subscription plan â€“ somewhat controversial since the subscription charges were not always transparent, and branched out into brick and mortar locations. One of the founders is Kate Hudson, daughter of Goldie Hawn, so there probably has been some advantages to a celebrity connection; easy to get that one-on-one with Oprah Winfrey, I presume. The company appears to this point to have been pretty savvy in a competitive field, marketing-wise, so all props to them. Iâ€™m not a customer of theirs in any case; the gym and the jogging track are not places where I go to show off my fashion sense. Iâ€™m old-school in that I prefer to work out in grey sweatpants and a baggy tee shirt.

The October Surprise

21. October 2020 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Media Matters Not, Politics

So the concept of an â€œOctober Surpriseâ€ in an election year is so hoary a notion that pundits have evolved that name for it; a planned last-minute revelation before an election (usually of the presidential-variety) of something so scandalous and disreputable that it upends the expected campaign win of the candidate the â€˜Surpriseâ€ is aimed at. The Rathergate â€“ Texas Air National Guard memo, which Dan Rather and 60 Minutes unleashed on George W. Bush just before the 2004 election is the example which springs first to mind, and never mind that it was launched in September. It was still a desperate partisan attempt to upturn an election.

Paint it Black

30. September 2020 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Geekery, Media Matters Not, Rant, World

Well, if this isnâ€™t a good reason for a grad student passionately interested in English literature â€“ meaning the study of classic literature written in English (starting with Beowulf and running all the way to Tom Stoppard) to avoid the U of Chicago and embrace a program of self-education then I donâ€™t know what is. Itâ€™s akin to being invited to a grand, lavish multi-course banquet and then only allowed a single tiny plate of hors d oeuvres. Which you must consume, and praise lavishly, and not even consider looking over at the main course. Or for another comparison â€“ be fascinated by American pop music all through the 20^th century, and then only be permitted to specialize in Motown. Because â€¦ reasons. Anyone fascinated by Chaucer or Tin Pan Alley is just plain out of luck, because of systemic racism, and overwhelming whiteness of the culture and the stain of slavery, et cetera, which is usually the reason given. Frankly, I think itâ€™s just momentarily fashionable to paint everything Black.

Comes the Moment to Decide

31. August 2020 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Politics

Once to ev’ry man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some great decision,
Off’ring each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever
‘Twixt that darkness and that light.

– James Russell Lowell

So the first shots in the shooting war have been fired, to the surprise of practically no one who has been following civic matters over the last six months. Admittedly, that the first would be fired in Kenosha, of all places â€“ thatâ€™s a bit of a surprise. Although it isnâ€™t at all startling that a Trump supporter would be gunned down on the streets of Portland by an Antifa thug shortly thereafter, to resounding cheers of approval. The hateful rhetoric and the violence against property has been ratcheting up and up, as has the violence against persons. At this juncture, bullets are merely a short step. For at least two people â€“ Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha and Michael Reinoehl in Portland, the choice to pull a trigger has been made, and made irrevocably, whether for good reasons or bad. (It is somewhat ironic, to read of this linked story, of progressive activists sniveling about the presence of â€œself-appointedâ€ vigilantes being tolerated by local police, harshing the mellow of all those justifiably indignant progressive protesters, whose street protests have, unfortunately and most mysteriously, turned into orgies of arson and looting.)

The Newsmaking Machinery Behind the Popular Song

30. July 2020 · 1 comment · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Media Matters Not

This last weekend, I had a tiny and depressing demonstration about the facile nature of local news â€“ the news making machinery behind the popular song as the pop song used to go. I did local news-gathering myself as an in-house broadcast professional, doing a daily radio news program for Armed Forces Radio, Seoul Korea edition. I know how the pudding is made; have the basic framework for the story, go out and talk to people for the bits that fill in the story already mentally mapped out in your mind â€“ and go and do it again the next day, and the day following. Daily news is sausage; stuff that casing with whatever the story requires, a judicious combination of meat or filler.

There was a house fire last Sunday afternoon in our neighborhood â€“ the first I knew of it (since I was working the final edit of Luna City #9) was when the Daughter Unit flung open the door, saying that a nearby house was on fire, that the dogs from the house were running loose on the street, and could I bring some doggie treats and help everyone catch them?

Oh, FFS!

22. July 2020 · 2 comments · Categories: Ain't That America?, Eat, Drink and be Merry, Fun and Games, General Nonsense, Local, Media Matters Not

As if it wasnâ€™t enough for the joyless, bitter scolds among the wokerati to have an absolute tizzy over the head of Goya Foods being civil and respectful of the office of the President of the US, another provider of excellent and relatively inexpensive foodstuffs is in their cross-hairs. Unlike the president of Goya Foods who basically told them to pound sand â€“ and is now enjoying the economic benefits of having defied the wokerati â€“ the management of Trader Joeâ€™s is beating a sniveling and apologetic retreat, and promising to redo their policy of labeling their various ethnic food items with a suitably ethnic variation on â€˜Trader Something-or-Otherâ€™. This was a bit of light-hearted bit of humor on their part, playing with naming stereotypes, but good lord, the grim and determined wokerati cannot abide any humor at all and so the whole concept must go. The Daughter Unit tells me, and this link conforms, that the whole thing started as a petition by high school students, which doesnâ€™t surprise me in the least. I suspect the responsible students are the earnest and censorious sorts, desperately trying to out-woke each other.

Frankly, the whole â€˜Trader Joeâ€™sâ€™ South Sea Island â€“ Tropical Paradise motif always struck me as a last gasp of the 1950s â€˜Tiki Cultureâ€™ and about the only one which didnâ€™t involve a bar decorated with fishing nets and dried starfish, and fru-fru drinks with little umbrellas in them. Trader Joeâ€™s various products are high quality, reasonably priced, and the social-consciousness is laid on with a light hand, in pleasant contrast with the mountain of ostentatious correctitude and high prices offered at Whole Foods. There is a reason the latter is derisively known as â€œWhole Paycheck.â€ I can only think itâ€™s only a matter of time before the social justice warriors go after Trader Joeâ€™s for that bit of cultural appropriation as well.

At least the providers of groceries are not having as rotten a year due to the Chinese Commie Crud as Hollywood is. Theaters shut down, premieres cancelled, top-flight releases like Greyhound, with Tom Hanks and based on C.S. Forestersâ€™ war novel The Good Shepherd diverted to release on streaming video, the fall-out from â€œMe Tooâ€ and Harvey Weinsteinâ€™s wholesale-level practice of the casting couch, the apparent urge among our producers of entertainment to whore after foreign audiences, and now looking to curry favor with the hot new trend of â€˜anyone but white heterosexuals in front of the camera and behind it as well as behind it in any capacityâ€™ â€¦ well, Establishment Hollywood has earned the foul reputation they richly deserve. Those of us in flyover country are watching old movies on DVD (from our own libraries, let it be known) or on streaming video, watching foreign films or series â€“ practically anything other than grim parables and lectures by the wokerati.

Comment as you wish: what are you going to watch, now? The Daughter Unit and I are watching episodes of Are You Being Served? Which has the side benefit of being gloriously politically incorrect, and not featuring any masks or six-foot apart social distancing. (The Daughter Unit and I temped for a few months at an upscale department store over the holiday season some years ago. We consider â€˜Servedâ€™ as nearly a documentary on retail sales at a certain level.)

The Daily Brief